Ashen trailer is big on atmosphere, sky beasts

Aurora44's Ashen continues to be a game I need in my life, the action RPG looking more necessary each time I see it. The following is our first proper look at it since a few-seconds-long gif sparked imaginations at around this time last year.

Yeah, Ashen was featured in Microsoft's E3 conference, but it's defo coming to PC as well. So what is it? Well it's a "3rd person action RPG about forging relationships", featuring an open world, "passive" multiplayer, big ol' beasties, high-stakes combat and "non-linear progression".

So it sounds a bit like Dark Souls meets Journey. You can see some of the not-particularly-passive-seeming multiplayer in action in the above video, which also features a friendly sky whale. Sky whales, naturally, are awesome.

There's no release date yet.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.